The Cat Tax: Tunisia’s Unofficial Terrace Ritual
- Aug 20
- 3 min read
Eat outside in Tunisia often enough and you learn to expect company.
Your food arrives. A few moments later, a cat appears from beneath a chair, along the pavement, or seemingly from nowhere at all. It takes up position beside the table and looks at your plate with the concentration of someone who has been waiting for this exact moment.
You eat. They wait. Sooner or later, you pay.
A piece of fish. A scrap of chicken. Something small enough to surrender without reopening negotiations with yourself.
This is the cat tax.
Quick Guide
Paying the Cat Tax
There are different approaches to collection.
Some cats keep their distance and rely almost entirely on eye contact. Others sit neatly beside your chair. The more experienced ones seem to know exactly which table ordered fish.
Then there are the ambitious collectors.
One contribution is accepted, eaten, and immediately revealed to have been merely the first instalment.
None of this requires much ceremony. A hand moves from plate to edge of table. A small piece drops. The cat collects what it came for and decides whether to stay, move on, or try its chances elsewhere.
Around it, dinner continues.
Cats move through medinas and neighborhood streets, sleep in doorways and beneath cars, appear around markets and cafés, and establish their own routes through the places people occupy.
The terrace is simply one of the more profitable stops.
The Cats That Belong to the Place
Spend enough time in the same neighborhood and individual cats begin to emerge from the general population.
There is the one that sleeps outside the same shop. The one that appears around a particular café. The one somebody leaves water for. The one that seems to have acquired several feeding arrangements without acquiring an owner.
People recognize them.
Sometimes they have names. Sometimes their description is enough. The orange one. The small black one. The one that is always here.
A cat does not always need to belong to someone to become part of a place.
That kind of familiarity develops through repetition: the same doorway, the same terrace, the same cat appearing around the same time.
The cat learns the neighborhood.
The neighborhood learns the cat.
And somewhere inside that relationship is the logic of the cat tax. The animal approaching your table is not necessarily entering an unfamiliar human world. It may know the territory considerably better than you do.
Between the Street and the Table
The terrace makes all of this particularly visible.
A café table may belong to the café, but the rhythm of life around it does not stop at the edge of the chairs. The pavement continues beside you. People pass. Waiters weave between tables. Conversations overlap. Someone is watching the street. Someone else is deep into a game of cards.
And somewhere underneath it all, a cat is moving from one table to another.
There is no dramatic entrance from “street” into “café.” The two are already sitting beside each other.
The cat simply moves between them.
That is why its presence can feel so ordinary. It joins a scene that is already open to everything happening around it, stays for as long as there is reason to stay, and disappears back into the neighborhood when there isn't.
An Unofficial Ritual
The cat tax has no rules.
Payment depends on the table, the meal, and the persistence of the cat collecting it. Sometimes a piece of fish is enough. Sometimes it appears to be only the beginning.
The ritual requires almost no ceremony. Food arrives. The cat notices. It waits. Someone eventually gives in.
A small piece passes from plate to cat.
The cat eats it.
For a moment, it looks as though the account is settled.
Then it looks back at your plate.
